Super boys : the amazing adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster : the creators of Superman

234 Pages·2013·3.71 MB·English

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For my dad
Contents

Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Part One: Distant Planet
Prologue
1. The Eyes
2. The Dreamer
3. The Education of Jerry Siegel
4. How to Meet Your Best Friend
5. Cosmic
6. Reign
Part Two: Rocket
7. Into the Air
8. Morning
9. Major
10. Next
11. Muscle and Power
12. Frankenstein’s Monster
13. The Muse
14. The Works
15. New Frontiers
16. Top of the World
17. How to Kill a Superman
18. Private
19. Superboy
20. Fifties
21. Invisible Kid
22. Bizarro No. 1
23. ’Nuff Said
Part Three: Steel
24. Fortress of Solitude
25. Motion
26. Bachelor No. 2
27. Both Sides
28. The House of El
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Photographs
Index
About the Author
Copyright
It was dead!
Stiletto Vance discerned that at once.
“Confronting us,” he informed me, “is evidently an insoluble mystery.
Who murdered this man? Why?”
I shook my head, puzzled, and confessed my perplexity.
“There is a solution!—must be one—and I shall find it!” he declared
confidently.
—Jerry Siegel, The Glenville Torch
March 12, 1931
Introduction

I am at Cleveland City Hall waiting for a copy of a birth certificate
that is not mine. The final typed draft of this book—marked-up,
messy, and almost done—lies in an immense pile on my desk at
home. But there is one more fact to check, so I am downtown, on a
gray October day. Numbers and dates and spelling: these things are
important. These are places to start from.
This book is not only a story but it is about one. The story we all
somehow absorb of a child rocketed to Earth from a dying planet. The
orphan grows up with incredible powers and is embraced by an Earth
he is sworn to protect. He likes a girl who doesn’t give him a second
glance. He wears a red, flowing cape, but also hides in plain sight. It is
a silly story sometimes; silly in the face of what the world sometimes
shows to us, yet it has given hope and solace to generations. That is
important, too.
I am still waiting for the birth certificate and am now worried about
how much time is left on my parking meter. To my right, on the black
benches, two employees are trying to help an elderly woman get a
death certificate for her late husband. The woman doesn’t understand
why the insurance company is making her do this. She came here on
the bus. She is crying. At the snack stand, which sells candy, pop, and
cheeseburgers, the clerk closes his eyes. On the small TV mounted
over the wrought-iron cashier’s cage, local junior high flag football is
being played. A kid catches a bomb and sails into the end zone.
When my dad would tell me that Superman was created here in
Cleveland, I never really believed him. We took excursions downtown
from the suburbs and explored it like it was some once-great
civilization, with huge parts of it empty and exploded away. There
were secrets and stories here, of a past that might once have been
golden. As I grew up, I began to see why he might be right. At the
time I am writing this, our football team has not won a game in eleven
months. Our baseball team has not won a championship since 1948.
The newspapers are filled with bad things. The air is getting cold and
the skies will be overcast for the next six months. When we see a
patch of blue, we look up and stare.
Superman is not real.
But here, at some point, he somehow was.
This story is not like the others. This story is not just about
Superman but is about two men and their work, both in public and in
secret, over a significant portion of the twentieth century. This is
about what they really did, not what we wanted them to. That is
important, too.
I never knew Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. I am not even remotely
related to them. But their story—creating the impossible Superman as
teenagers during the Great Depression—is one that somehow
resounds through all of us with a soundtrack we can almost always
just hear. In the comics, Superman is always looking for secrets to his
heritage. That is no coincidence. We all want to know where we come
from. The same goes for our dreams and fictions. Why have these
characters lasted? What can they tell us? Most people may claim to
like Batman better, but it is Superman who measures the best of us.
We want to know why.
But how? Not only through dusty facts and forgotten artifacts but
through the very actions that stole their hours. The truth is, Jerry and
Joe told us their own secrets in the comics and stories they puzzled
over for decades. We have been distracted by half-remembered tales
when the answer has been right in front of us the whole time. The
work: that is their secret identity.
Superman is not real. But the facts I discovered are just as
unbelievable: a mystical cult, a bald, power-mad millionaire, a
bulletproof strongman, the real Lois Lane, and a writer’s unlikely,
secret service to his country. I found out that the first Superman story
was stolen. I not only learned the true cause of Jerry’s father’s death
but who the culprits could be. How? I live in Cleveland; I went to all
the places and read all the comics. It took a long time. I read Jerry’s
last, unpublished story and my spine, as the comics always promised,
actually tingled. And I discovered someone real who, by all accounts,
is supposed to be a lie. And somewhere in this book is who I think
Superman really is. But that’s my interpretation; you have to find
yours.
They call my name and I pay $25 for a birth certificate of someone
I did once meet, but am not related to. I open it and pause. It is a new
date and a new spelling, one that sounds suspiciously like a famous
Superman character. This is how it starts: how truth can become
imagination, and thus, a window into a hopeful world right next to our
own. But creation has a cost.
Superman isn’t real. But sometimes we wish he could be.
This is the story of that wish coming true.